Ahead, lightning flashed on the horizon, and thunder rolled across the sky.
Carla wasn’t on again until third shift the following night, and from the moment she met Trent Whitmore on her steps until she pulled into the staff parking lot at Deacon Valley, she didn’t sleep. The storm which had been threatening since the previous day had arrived with a vengeance, and now, at a quarter of eleven, it was punishing this entire corner of Oklahoma. Rain hammered the roof, and curtains of water marched across the parking lot, driven by a high wind which made the car shake.
She sat for a while with the engine off, watching the storm, thinking of what was to come. She had received a call late this afternoon from Warden Epps – and he never called officers at home – which she let go to message. The warden’s voice was low, without a trace of humor, and he called her Sergeant Mendez, instead of the familiar Carla he had used with her for years. Epps instructed her to report to Lt. Dykestrom, the third shift watch commander, as soon as she arrived at the prison. He gave no further details, and hung up without saying goodbye.
So this was the end of it. Trent Whitsome reported what he had learned about her, and that was that. She would be fired, certainly. Would they prosecute her for falsification of her employment and background records? Probably. The state didn’t have a high level of tolerance for misconduct from its employees. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that she had missed the many chances to exact revenge for Anita’s murder, and tonight would be the last time she would ever be allowed inside the facility. She would never get another shot at Kelvin Finch, and there was no way they’d let her get near him tonight.
She had failed, and she started to cry. She didn’t tell Anita how sorry she was, again, didn’t tell her daughter how much she loved her. She simply cried. When the internal storm had wrung her out, Carla stepped into the downpour and hustled towards the entrance. There was no point trying to avoid the consequences of her actions. By the time she got inside she was soaked and shaking.
The on-duty officer checking in staff gave her a pleasant good evening as she passed through the metal detector. He didn’t look at her funny or order her to wait for an escort. She passed half a dozen more officers in the corridors, all exchanging greetings, none of them acting unusual. Carla struggled to act the same. One officer told her that the power from OMPA, the Oklahoma Municipal Power Authority, was down and the prison was running on its emergency generators. He said there were tornado warnings as well.
Carla ducked into the ladies locker room to towel off and rub at her hair before going into the Pen, the central ready area for COs. Outgoing second shift officers were mixing with oncoming third shifters, some sharing the day’s stories, but in most cases talking sports or families or anything other than about the prison. None of them acted any differently with her. She headed into the briefing room, where all that changed when Dean saw her.
“Come over here,” he said softly, taking her elbow and leading her over to the cluster of desks the sergeants used. She went without protest. He looked around, keeping his voice low. “Dykestrom called me into his office a few minutes ago. He said he got a call from the warden, who got a call from some HBO executive.”
She just looked at him.
“What the hell, Carla? You’ve been lying to everyone? To me, all these years?” He frowned at her. “What’s your real name?”
“Mendez is my maiden name. When I was married it was Carla Rodriguez.” There was no sense trying to keep up the charade.
“And your daughter…Finch…”
“Kelvin Finch abducted my daughter eleven years ago,” she said, surprised at how calm her voice was. “He held her for three months, repeatedly raping and torturing her, and when he was finished he killed her, cut her into pieces and buried her. It was almost a year before we knew she was dead, and not just missing. We didn’t recover her body until after Finch was caught.”
Dean stared at her, slowly shaking his head at her words, too stunned to speak. How was it she was still sane after something like that? And then she had worked so very hard to position herself inches from the man who had done it all. For what purpose? The easy answer was revenge, but over all these years she would have had hundreds, thousands of chances to kill him. But she hadn’t. None of it made any sense.
“I don’t even know what to say to you.” Dean still had her by the arm, but it wasn’t a grip, more a touch of comfort.
“I wish I had an answer that you would understand,” she said, her eyes starting to well up. She saw he was hurt, and had never thought about how this would affect him if it all came out. It was never meant to until it was over, and then she wouldn’t be around to see it. But now here was this man whom she still cared for, wounded and confused, and she couldn’t even explain it.
“Dykestrom’s looking for you. He’s going to suspend you and send you home.”
“I know.”
“Carla, you could be prosecuted on several counts, fraud for one.”
She sighed. “I know. And I’ll take what’s coming.”
He looked around again. “Or you could just turn around and walk out of here right now. No one else knows, no one will stop you. Get in your car, pack some things and leave, just disappear.”
She smiled at him and touched his face. “You’re a sweet man, Dean Frye. I missed out on a good one.”
He started to protest, but she shook her head. “I did all this. I’ll face it.” She wished she felt the conviction of her words. Fired, locked up or simply kicked out, how would she face the rest of her life knowing she’d had the chance and failed to give Finch the justice he had coming? It wasn’t a life worth living. But then, had it ever been? Not for eleven years now.
“I’ll walk with you,” he said, reluctantly letting go of her arm. His voice was thick as he struggled to keep his emotions in check. Carla nodded, and then glanced past him, her breath cut short.
Anita was standing in the corner of the briefing room.
She was like smoke, and Carla could see through her to the wall beyond, but it was Anita. Her little girl’s eyes were far away and sad, and she stood with her arms loose at her sides, hair limp about her face. Carla had never seen anything so forlorn in her life, and her heart broke all over again.
Anita looked at her mother, and then turned and walked through a door.
Carla looked quickly at Dean. “I need to make a stop before we go.” She moved to her desk and unlocked the bottom drawer, pulling out the nylon sports bag which had rested there in the dark for so many years. “I need to take care of some girl stuff first.”
He barely glanced at the bag, and didn’t notice the way it sagged in the center from the weight.
Carla hurried through the briefing room and out the door her daughter had taken. The corridor beyond was empty except for the gray little shape drifting down its center ahead of her, feet unmoving and not touching the floor. A trail of cold air followed behind her.
“Mommy’s coming, sweetheart,” she breathed, quickening her pace, the contents of the sports bag clanking. She knew this hallway well, and where it led. A few moments later Anita paused, turned, and passed through another door. When Carla reached it she had to flip through her keys to find the one which unlocked it. A few seconds later she was alone in a small room, the hallway door closed and relocked behind her, the only light a thin white line shining under the door from the hallway. She set down her bag and stood there in the dark, facing the outline of a steel door. If Anita was in the room, she couldn’t see her.
Carla waited, her heart pounding, the room freezing.
“Mommy’s ready, baby.”
Deacon Valley Correctional Facility relied on OMPA for all its power needs. In the event of a power failure from that source, the prison automatically shifted to the emergency generators housed in a cinderblock building just outside the wire. Within the loud, oily smelling building sat a trio of big yellow, air-cooled 975kw Caterpillars with the capacity to produce well in excess of the r
oughly 2,400 volts needed to run the prison. Properly fueled, the generators could run indefinitely, or at least as long as it took to restore central power, permitting the facility to carry on without disruption. In the unlikely event the big Cats failed, a few smaller, individual units around the facility would kick in to continue providing power to the top priority areas; the main gates, perimeter and tower lights, and parts of the administrative building. There was no such third level failsafe for the majority of the prison itself, including the blocks.
The tornado dropped out of the sky without warning at ten minutes past eleven, a violent funnel as black as the devil’s heart. It cut a savage trough across the killing fields outside the wire, and then slammed into the generator building, obliterating it in an explosion of cinderblock and mangled yellow metal that spun out into the screaming wind and rain. Two of the big Cats were torn apart instantly, and the lights at Deacon Valley flickered and surged. The third generator, untouched by the twister, struggled to take on the full load, whining up like a turbine engine until it was squealing louder than the storm. Unable to keep up with the drain, it exploded like a little star, and Deacon Valley was dropped into darkness.
The energy of the storm already had the prison’s population awake and wound up in much the same way intense lightning and thunder will agitate zoo animals in their cages. When the power crashed and the cell blocks went black, it pushed them over the edge. Violence erupted almost immediately in most of the forty-eight man, dormitory-style housing units. Some was directed at the glass of CO bubbles, some against bunks or wall-mounted televisions protected by steel mesh. There was yelling and screaming, fires were started. And there in the dark, with only the hellish light from a burning mattress to see by, well-hidden shanks came out and old grudges were settled. Men were stabbed and kicked to death and had their heads bashed in with knees and doubled fists, rapists and pedophiles and Aryans and Crips and whoever had done something to someone else and was owed a death. In minutes the prison was rocked by riots in six of the cell blocks. The alert siren was one of the few devices able to run on backup power, and it howled throughout the facility.
It was the series of events which Carla had needed, had waited on for eleven years. In that little room, she used a big brass key on the steel door and opened it, heaving it to the side. A wall mounted, battery-powered emergency light on one wall lit the arsenal in black and white, and Carla went to work with the speed of someone who had drilled for years. Her fingers flipped through the key ring with trained precision as she unlocked the assorted racks and cabinets, selecting what she would need and slinging the gear across her chest and over her shoulders. When she was ready, she retrieved the weighted sports bag, left the steel door standing open, and moved back out into the hall, taking off at a run.
Chaos. Over the blare of the siren, men were running in the dark, orders were shouted, and in the distance was the muffled roar from the cell blocks. Thunder shook the prison as the storm descended in force, and outside the shooters huddled in their towers as the twister shredded a hundred yards of fence and razor wire, then lifted an unmanned patrol jeep and spun it away into the night sky.
Dean Frye met Lt. Dykestrom in the hallway, both of them carrying mag-lites.
“DV-2 through DV-6 is coming apart,” the Lt. said, “and they’re almost through the bubble at DV-4. Looks like the sprinkler system is still working, though. Three’s bubble reports the fires are out.” Both of their radios crackled with shouting voices and confusion.
“Any losses?” Dean was opening the outer door to the arsenal as running COs started forming up in the hallway behind him.
“Negative. All bubbles have reported in.” The Lt. looked around. “Where’s Mendez?”
“She came this way a few minutes ago,” Dean said, pushing open the door. The Lt. followed him in. They saw the open steel door immediately, and then they were both inside, panning their lights around. There were only three people with keys to the arsenal, and two of them were standing right here. They looked at the unlocked weapons racks and open lockers, then at each other as officers pushed past them. The COs started pulling on body armor and helmets, arming themselves with shotguns and batons, gasmasks and Plexiglas shields.
Mendez did not respond to the repeated radio calls from either Dykestrom or Frye.
The two men quickly geared up. “Send the SRT to DV-4,” said Dykestrom, “I’ll get the rest of them moving. Then go find Mendez.”
Dean quickly assembled the Special Response Team in the hallway, giving instructions to the senior man before they ran off as a unit. Then he headed down another corridor, gripping his shotgun in one hand and his flashlight in the other, its white beam leading the way. He had a good idea where she was going.
Officers Pico and Moore were buttoned up in the bubble at DV-8, listening to the chatter on their radios, broken by frequent bursts of static, glancing occasionally at the ceiling. It sounded like the storm would peel back the roof at any moment. Beyond the armored glass, the Monster House was still, all the inmates locked safely away in their individual cells, a single box of emergency lights high on a wall casting long shadows across the common area.
Banging at the glass to their backs made them jump, and they turned to see Sgt. Mendez in the hallway beyond, holding a mag-lite. For a moment they were confused, because the SRT sergeant wasn’t wearing her riot gear as they would have expected. She wasn’t even wearing her baseball cap, and her wet hair hung loose about her face and shoulders. She was armed, though, and carrying equipment bags.
She rapped the mag-lite against the glass. “Open up.”
They did, using the manual lever to unlock the power-driven door, pulling it open on its tracks. She moved inside and dropped her bags.
“Both of you report to the arsenal and Sgt. Frye. I’ll man the PC until I’m relieved.” She handed them her flashlight.
They glanced at each other. Shouldn’t she be leading an SRT squad somewhere? Pico looked at her. “Sergeant, you know we always need two in the bubble, no matter what.”
Carla glared at the younger man. “Get your asses to the arsenal, now.”
“Yes, Sergeant!” They ran from the bubble and down the hall.
Carla pulled the door shut and watched the bouncing light disappear into the darkness. Once it was gone, she picked up her bags and went through the interior door, into the common area of the housing unit, pulling that door shut behind her as well. She crouched and unzipped the bag which had rested in her desk for so long, removing a pair of steel wedges and a hand-held sledge. She placed the wedge under the door to the bubble and slammed it home with repeated hits of the sledge. The PING, PING, PING of metal on metal reverberated off the concrete walls. Then she moved to the door to the airlock passage and did the same, PING, PING, PING.
The storm had already awakened half the men in the Monster House. Carla’s hammering woke the rest, and faces appeared at small windows.
Carla tossed the sledge back at the sports bag, then slung the other bag over a shoulder as she raced across the room, weaving in and out of the tables, going straight to Kelvin Finch’s cell. He was at the door, staring out at her through the glass, his face puffy with sleep. She opened his food slot at crouched in front of it.
“Wake up, Finch. You don’t want to miss this.”
Before he could reply, she was moving from cell to cell, unlocking the individual food slots and leaving them open, ignoring the questions from the men inside. A minute later her combat boots thudded up the metal stairs to the second tier, where she moved down the row doing the same to all fourteen cells.
“Finch, can you hear me?” she shouted, her voice echoing through the big room. She unslung the evil-looking, black Mossberg combat shotgun and pumped a round into the chamber. “Her name was Anita Rodriguez. She was seven years old.”
“What’s going on, Sergeant?” asked the man on the other side of the door. Parker Dunn; molested a five-year-old boy in the men’s room of a Chucky Cheese,
and when he cried out, strangled him. Carla shoved the barrel of the Mossberg through the slot and into Dunn’s soft belly, pulling the trigger. It nearly cut him in half.
The weapon’s blast sounded like a bomb going off, and as one the men in the Monster House started yelling. Carla moved to the next cell. Eldon Whitley; serial child rapist who used a hammer to forever silence his victims. He was kneeling in front of his food slot, trying to see what was going on. Fatal curiosity. He saw the looming muzzle of the Mossberg inches from his face a second before it went off.
“She was my little girl, Finch,” she yelled. “My baby.”
Tyrone Lawrence; tied his girlfriend to a kitchen chair and forced her to watch as he sodomized her nine-year-old daughter before killing her with a kitchen knife. Tyrone had pulled his mattress off his bunk and was holding it against the inside of the door, blocking the food slot. The Mossberg roared, shredding the mattress and blowing Tyrone’s spine out through his back.
The inmates were screaming, calling for help, hurling obscenities and mindless questions.
“Are you listening, Finch?” Carla shouted.
Leon Smith; raped and murdered his two stepsons then set the house on fire with his wife inside. He tried to hide back under his bunk. The Mossberg found him.
Donald Poleski; abducted a girl from a sleepaway camp and held her for a weekend in a cabin, alternating between raping her and forcing her to play board games with him until he decapitated her. Donald hugged the near corner of his cell, keeping back from the food slot and any angle the Mossberg might have on him while he screamed “No!” over and over. Carla dug a flashbang grenade out of the bag over her shoulder and dropped it through the slot, stepping back and looking away, covering her ears. The blast and white light was like a moment of suspended time, followed by a void of silence. Carla used one of her big brass keys to manually unlock the cell door, pulling it open on its tracks. Donald Poleski was crumpled in the corner, hands pawing weakly at the air. She stepped inside, and blew his head off at close range.
In The Falling Light Page 29